Feminist News

911 Delay Allows Rapists to Attack Woman

A woman, walking along a highway late at night, noticed a van slowly following her. Frightened, she picked up a nearby phone and dialed 911. The operator instructed her to remain by the phone and that a deputy was on the way. Thirty-five minutes later, deputies arrived at the scene. Within that time, two men from the van abducted and took turns raping the woman. After the attack, the 26-year-old woman walked to Pasco County, called the deputies and reported the attacks.

The slow 911 response came from the same Hillsborough County, Florida department which took 34 minutes to show up to a house where someone else had reported hearing a woman screaming because she was being beaten. By the time they responded to that call, a man who had served time for earlier abducting, raping and cutting off the forearms of a teen-age hitchhiker in 1978, Lawrence Singleton, had brutally killed another woman in his home. The excuse for the slow response to the murder was a shift change and rush- hour traffic. The excuse for this latest slow response: the deputy on the way stopped off to assist in an unrelated search of suspected car thieves.